The New 52 Interviews: Batman

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Scott Snyder digs into the Dark Knight's psyche.

By Joey Esposito

To celebrate the relaunch of the DC Universe with 52 brand new #1 issues, IGN is doing an interview series with the creative teams behind this historic comics event. For the month of September, IGN Comics is your place to go behind the inner workings of these new books and find out what to expect from the new DCU.

IGN Comics: Can you talk a little bit about transitioning from writing Dick Grayson to writing Bruce Wayne as Batman? What are the fundamental differences between the two?

Scott Snyder: I mean for me, Dick Grayson is really a great character and it was really tough for me to let him go. I love writing him because he really is one of the most relatable characters in the DCU. His sense of enthusiasm, his empathy, his compassion. He's sort of the guy that we all can relate to or want to be friends with and can completely get inside his head. He's funny and he's the guy you'd want to be next to or the guy you'd want to be if you got to be Batman. He doesn't have the same pathological drive and obsession and baggage that Bruce has. So it's a great joy to get to write him because he cracks jokes and he smiles and you can flex all of those muscles. He's confessional to the reader a lot of the time. He's very open and emotionally vulnerable.

Bruce is sort of a total 180 from that, in a lot of ways. When I started writing him, it actually took a second for me to kind of readjust because he's so -- even though he talks to you and he narrates and he's confessional – he is definitely not emotionally open the way that Dick is. He plays it much more close to the vest even in his narration. What he tells you are the facts of the case, he tells you what he's going to do, and in a lot of ways it's almost using characters like Dick Grayson and Alfred a lot of the time to give you the things about him that he doesn't see about himself in those moments. He's almost like a less reliable narrator, even though he's much more authoritative.

So it's huge fun, because Bruce is just a warrior. He's so badass. It's impossible not to have a blast writing him in every scene, especially under the cowl. But the thing that was really fun about Dick is that Dick is the opposite, where he's constantly open and guessing and learning. You know, trying things out and talking to you about them. They're very, very different experiences and they're both just as fun. I do miss Dick, and I'd love to write him again someday but he's in very good hands with Kyle [Higgins].

IGN: Something else that sort of goes with that is something you've explored in Detective and Gates of Gotham: the history of Gotham City and its personality – the concept of the "black mirror." How does that change from Bruce's perspective? How does he see Gotham?

Snyder: That's a really good question. I mean, for me, the idea is that Gotham does the same thing always. Which is, it brings its heroes' nightmares to life. So for Dick, that meant sort of changing and adapting and showing Dick that it was becoming his Gotham and that it was going to be going for his Achilles heel, his jugular, and his sense of vulnerability, so that his villain – like James Jr. – would be somebody who was devoid of compassion and empathy the way that those are Dick's greatest strengths. So his nemesis was someone that has the exact opposite skill set than him and is trying to convince him that his own strengths as a character – which in my opinion, make him the hero that he is – are weaknesses.

For Bruce, the black mirror idea is in effect again. To me, it's really that Bruce's vulnerability and the thing that makes him the greatest hero of all time both is his confidence and his sense of competence. His familiarity of Gotham; he owns the city. That's the feeling we want in issue #1 and #2, in the early parts. He's back in Gotham, it's his city, nobody is a better guardian, no one has ever been. It's effortless for him to be its greatest hero and its legend. But in the same way that Gotham throws those new challenges at Dick Grayson, where it begins to undercut is that sense of confidence and strength, the enemy that Bruce is facing here is really about establishing a kind of rival for Bruce that could've been there much longer than him and could lay claim to the city in a way that's really shocking to him. So their presence in the city, right down to the architecture where the symbol of the owl is actually carved into things, and their actual social and political and violent presence in the city, historically, is something that completely dwarfs Batman's presence in the city. So he's almost shocked to look beneath his feet and see this kind of sinkhole that's huge and he didn't even know was there.

To me, that's something that really undercuts Bruce's confidence and is terrifying to him, in at least my perception of him as a character. To me, that's what Bruce has. Dick Grayson has a sense of himself as a good person, as someone who is empathetic and compassionate and has good friends and relationships. Bruce loves the Bat-family the best he can and has relationships as well, I'm not saying that he's totally dark and pathological and obsessive all the time, but what he really has is Batman. That's at the core of Bruce. Those relationships and all of those things are important, but the reason he's always alone in those future iterations of him in Batman Beyond and Dark Knight Returns is because he always puts work first; he puts Batman first. If you undercut his sense of competence as Batman and his sense of owning the city and being its hero and being the best and all of that stuff, by showing him something huge that he didn't even know was there, to me that really is doing the same thing in that twisted fun house mirror way where you are showing the thing that's one of his great strengths as a vulnerability. You're breaking him, you know?

IGN: Absolutely, and I think you showed that in issue #1 with his constant connection to the stuff in the Batcave; he's just always "on."

Snyder: Thanks! Yeah, that was the idea with that stuff. He never is just Bruce. He's always Batman.

IGN: Going off what you were saying about his relationships – we saw a little bit in issue #1 – what can we expect in the way of a supporting cast? Is it Bruce and Alfred, or will Dick and Damian be involved in your story?

Snyder: Well, they'll all be there. I want it to be a story that's deeply about Bruce Wayne and Gotham and Batman. So, it won't be a big team-up book in that regard. But that said, the enemy in the book really has this predatory symbol of the owl that's built into the history of Gotham in a lot of ways. In that way, one of things that they're going to be attacking Batman and the Bat-family with is all the resources of history, and these violent resources will be really fun to see them pitted against in big ways. But also, they are going to be attacking Batman by showing him things about the past, the way that certain characters were shaped.

Even characters that he considers friends and allies were actually influenced by the events that were brought about by the Court of Owls and things like that. That, to me, is even the greater attack in some ways. Showing that characters you consider your allies and friends might have secrets about them in their past or their families that undercut your sense of confidence in those relationships. There will be really big revelations about Dick Grayson, the Grayson family, the Wayne family, the Drakes, a lot of stuff like that. How the history of Gotham and the history of this organization and the Wayne family is brought to bear on the present. So they'll be in play in big ways, but they might not be teaming up and stuff every issue. But you'll see them a lot and they'll be greatly affected by the story.

IGN: Cool. I don't know if you can answer this, but obviously issue #1 ended with quite a cliffhanger involving Dick. Is that going to be reflected at all in Nightwing?

Snyder: Yeah, it will actually. I can say that. The stories are independent – I don't want anyone to get the sense that they need to read them both. I wouldn't do that and neither would Kyle and neither would DC. They are very separate first arcs and they're totally independent of each other. So the answer to this mystery isn't in Nightwing, and the answer to the mystery in Nightwing isn't in Batman. But the events of Batman will reverberate in Nightwing and the events of Nightwing will reverberate in Batman. There will be a point later on where they cross, and you see things happen in both issues that overlap. So we do want it to be something that's a shared Bat-universe. One of the things I'm really interested in is this notion that Dick Grayson has been Batman, he has been Robin. And Bruce Wayne is constantly pulling him in and pushing him away and that relationship, the complicated father/son relationship that they have, the brotherly relationship that they have.

In the future iterations in like Dark Knight Returns or Batman Beyond or alternate universe versions of Batman, he often is at odds with Dick Grayson or Dick isn't speaking to him anymore. In that way, we wanted to play up the sense that what happens in this story will hit that note. That maybe they're destined to be partners to the end, but maybe they're also destined to be at odds at some point in the future in very big ways.

Maybe Dick Grayson will have to be the person, thirty or forty years from now, that actually brings Bruce down if Bruce goes over the line in some strange future version of Batman. And playing with those things that are deeply embedded in the mythos through stories that are outside the canon in some ways but are still there in the minds of fans… that's why we really wanted to play with this idea of owls, as well. That's a symbol that I think for long time fans has baggage. But for new fans, it's also just something that's a new organization to bring in.

The last thing I'll say is that obviously Dick Grayson is not, you know, a secretly evil person. Meaning openly or consciously, he's not somebody that goes around killing people. Obviously, you get to the cliffhanger and you know that's the case. But it's a mystery. Part of that note, setting up Dick as a suspect or somebody whose relationship to Batman is called into question, is something that will be a big part of the big story. So it's not a throwaway in terms of whether or not he did it and he killed this guy. It's meant to be a note that's going to have echoes throughout the entire run and will affect the Nightwing as well. So it's something that thematically is going to be in the real fiber of the story.

IGN: We've talked a lot about Dick Grayson, but how are Bruce's relationships with his other Robins, and will we see that in the book at all?

Snyder: Yeah, you will! You'll definitely see Damian; you saw him in the first issue and you'll see him again a couple of issues later. And Tim's doing his thing over in Teen Titans and Jason as well in Red Hood and the Outlaws. So they're off doing their stuff but I think the idea of what they mean to him individually and collectively as a family he's taken in one at a time will be something that's alluded to a lot, or brought up in a big way as a point of vulnerability for Bruce.

Because they are; he cares about them. Whether or not he's always the best protector/parent/partner is always up for grabs, but he cares about them deeply. I mean, Jason's death is still his greatest failure. So that sense of them being a walking set of Achilles heels all the time is there and something that we're going to bring into play in Batman.